beyond separate spheres: intellectual roots of modern feminismby rosalind rosenberg

Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism by Rosalind RosenbergReview by: Patricia A. PalmieriSigns, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Spring, 1984), pp. 496-499Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173718 .

Accessed: 18/06/2014 21:04

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Signs.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.228 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 21:04:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173718?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


496 Book Reviews

Auerbach's final chapter epitomizes the dangers of such an ap- proach. Drawing suggestive parallels between ideas about "mobile" womanhood and belief in the transcendence of literary character, she identifies both as the key constituents of "the Victorian imagination" and reifies all three. In her epilogue, "The Death of Character and the Fight for Womanhood," we actually find her looking back nostalgically on the nineteenth century as an age that exalted woman's power and celebrated her "as central, not marginal" (p. 219). Even more troubling is her implicit presentation of social historians, literary modernists, and anti- character theorists as coconspirators in the twin literary crimes of this century, the demythicization of womanhood and the destruction of Vic- torian faith in the immortality of literary character. Although it goes far toward recovering what anthropologist Mary Douglas has termed "implicit meanings," Woman and the Demon ultimately collapses into a strained exercise in the history of ideas.3 Auerbach has taken her subtitle much too literally.

3. Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London: Routledge & Ke- gan Paul, 1975). The task of reconstructing such implicit belief systems is central to Carol F. Karlsen's doctoral dissertation (to be published by W. W. Norton & Co.), "The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century New England" (Yale University, 1980). In this ground-breaking study, Karlsen brilliantly explores and successfully unravels the complex interconnections among changing Puritan ideas about womanhood, the in- herited legacy of implicit witchcraft beliefs, and colonial women's actual historical experience.

Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism. By Rosalind Rosenberg. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982.

Patricia A. Palmieri, Dartmouth College

Historians studying the college-educated women of the Progressive Era have focused primarily on those who fused Victorian values about women's special morality with the Darwinian doctrine of sexual differentia- tion in order to fashion powerful roles for themselves as social reformers. At the same time, intellectual historians have been building a case for this era's importance in the development of the social sciences and the emergence of the culture of professionalism. In Beyond Separate Spheres, Rosalind Rosenberg brilliantly bridges these scholarly domains to con- sider the careers of a few women scholars who, while they had some ties to Progressive reform, identified themselves mainly as researchers and used their social science training to challenge the presumption of sexual polarity.

Conventionally, historians have concluded that women's higher education reinforced rather than revolutionized women's limited social roles. Rosenberg argues the opposite: In the late nineteenth century,



Spring 1984 497

higher education provided a base from which a generation of women launched their attack on the ideology of separate spheres. College at- tendance allowed women to demonstrate their intellectual equality with men, and women graduates like Marion Talbot banded together in the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), an organization that would officially repudiate the claims of the medical establishment that collegiate women were biologically doomed. Availing themselves of the new social science survey methods, the ACA issued a series of reports documenting the good health of college-educated women, hoping to make moot the question of women's physiological distinctiveness and reproductive vul- nerability. Nonetheless, Rosenberg argues, this first assault on Victorian values would have been abortive had women not gained entry into the research university, for only it provided "the kind of authority that would support an alternative view of women's capacity" (p. 24).

Like other historians of higher education, Rosenberg reveres the research university, lauding in particular the University of Chicago and to a lesser degree Columbia University as seedbeds of intellectual spe- cialization and social change. But for Rosenberg, Chicago's significance rests partially in its commitment to coeducation, a climate in which students and faculty learned to value women's competence, and its success in attracting to its faculty a group of young male intellectuals who were sympathetic to feminism. Reared in pious homes, with fathers who were often ministers or professors, men like George Herbert Mead, James R. Angell, and John Dewey accepted and indeed applauded feminine values, identifying them with religion and culture. Their choice of an academic vocation, Rosenberg tells us, illustrates their detachment from the stereotypical male world of commerce and materialism. Influenced by their mothers and their well-educated wives, these men formed a nucleus of dissenters who were ripe for the revisionist thinking of their brilliant and select female disciples.

After establishing this background, Rosenberg begins her in-depth discussion of several women who, as graduate students, took advantage of the emerging social sciences to challenge the notion of a biological basis for sex differences. Helen Thompson Woolley, for example, ex- ploited the new empiricism sweeping through Chicago's philosophy department in the 1890s to disprove, with a crucial set of experiments, that physiology dictated sex differences. At Columbia, Leta Holling- worth seized on the antievolutionary perspective in psychology to do studies that dismissed the supposed debilitating effects of menstruation on women's mental abilities. In the sociology department at Chicago, Jessie Taft, influenced by her mentor, George Herbert Mead, wrote a dissertation that used sociological theories of personality development to define female marginality. Two Barnard anthropologists, Elsie Chew Parsons and Margaret Mead, inspired by Frank Boas, surveyed women's social roles in cross-cultural perspective. Mead's best-selling published

Signs



498 Book Reviews

dissertation initiated a life-time of work in which she identified "mas- culine" and "feminine" as cultural constructs.

Rosenberg's portrait of these women clearly demonstrates that, re- gardless of academic discipline, each shaped her research agenda after confronting, sometimes painfully, gender-related personal and profes- sional dilemmas. Paradoxically, these scholars benefited from the very Victorian notion of separate spheres that they sought to dismantle; it allowed them to become extraordinarily self-conscious of their womanhood. But the notion of feminine distinctiveness, while useful and appropriate to feminist social reformers at Hull House, was often dys- functional within the academy. The intellectual world shaped by the mainstream academic departments at Chicago and Columbia was dom- inated by men, and it devalued women. Thus the women studied by Rosenberg sought to downplay gender. They hoped to find in science the means for transcending limitations imposed by academic models of biological sex differences. They were attracted to and indeed relied on scientific objectivity for formulating new ideas about women's equality with men. In this process, they at times purposively cut themselves off from the nurtural community of women social reformers. The tragedy, of course, is that social science is not value free. Rather than being hospitable to research on women, and to academic women themselves, the social sciences were hostile. Left on the margins of American intellectual life, almost all of Rosenberg's subjects were kept from careers that would have allowed them to circulate and expand on their novel ideas. Even Margaret Mead held no academic post but labored from a room in the Museum of Natural History. Her mentor, Ruth Benedict, was passed over at Columbia as Boas's successor and did not gain a full professorship there until six months before her death.

This is an extraordinarily important book, the full implications of which cannot be covered in this short review. Given this significance, it is important to raise a few troublesome points. First, Rosenberg asserts that the female intellectual world, represented by the ACA and the women's colleges, could not produce an authoritative criticism of the ideology of separate spheres. However, many academic women at the women's colleges did use the social sciences to scuttle biological theories of innate sexual inequality, even while they remained within a separate female world. More research is necessary before we can dismiss the originality or force of their feminist thinking. Second, Rosenberg claims that the intellectual milieu of Chicago was overwhelmingly responsible for the emergence of a group of female scholars who disavowed the distinctiveness of women. However, others mentioned briefly in the text who were also trained at Chicago-such as Sophonisba Breckenridge, Edith Abbott, and Katharine Benet Davis-went on to publish studies that used social science techniques to affirm women's special nature. How can we ultimately account for the ideological differences among this generation



Spring 1984 499

of intellectual women? Were the differences rooted primarily in their university training, as Rosenberg suggests, or rather in personality, fam- ily history, or distinctive social role? Finally, Rosenberg's definition of the women scholars she studies as "modern feminists" casts some as- persion on earlier and later feminists who sustained the vision of woman as special moral being. Feminism could perhaps be better expressed as a continuing intellectual debate about the nature of woman, with all the voices in this debate accorded equal value.

In her introduction, Rosenberg laments that the ideas of these women scholars, who used social science to challenge notions of sexual polarity, have been lost. Her painstaking research reveals, however, that an in- spiring feminist social science tradition exists. She shows that women scholars influenced and provided direction for one another. There were collegial collaborations, as in the case of Thompson and Hollingworth, and important student-teacher relationships, as in the case of Benedict and Mead. While Rosenberg is right to stress that woeful silences abound in the history of feminist social science, her book now gives us a means by which to rediscover, reclaim, and reevaluate that tradition.

Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History. By Bettina Aptheker. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.

Jacqueline Jones, Wellesley College

The six essays in this collection focus on the roles of Afro-American women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics include the "uneasy embrace" (p. 76) between the women's suffrage and black civil rights movements; the oppression of black womanhood as a theme in the works of W. E. B. Du Bois; black women professionals in the late nineteenth century; domestic labor, paid and unpaid, among black and white women; and black female political and union activists during the period 1945-65. Woman's Legacy offers provocative insights into the ways in which racial, sexual, and economic exploitation have interlocked in the experiences of black women. Just as significantly, these essays also show the ways in which black women of different times and backgrounds have struggled to liberate themselves and their menfolk-too often in the face of resistance from white middle-class women as well as men.

Aptheker writes from a self-consciously political perspective; in an introductory note she announces that her "work engages a dialectical, historical-materialist mode of analysis," and she prefaces each essay with a brief autobiographical statement, describing the various events and individuals that served as sources of inspiration for her scholarly efforts. For example, she tells how, as a child, she came to know and respect W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois and thus explains why

Signs



beyond separate spheres: intellectual roots of modern feminismby rosalind rosenberg

Documents